Narco Wars

By Tom Chandler

Tom Chandler arrived in Bogotá at the height of the cocaine boom. Pablo Escobar lay dead, the Cali Cartel had taken over much of the global supply and an avalanche of coke was poised to hit Europe. Now the British government wanted Chandler and his team to do the impossible: infiltrate the most powerful crime syndicates on earth and stop their drug shipments.

It was a perilous assignment. The cartel bosses operated like a lethal multinational, with armies of hit men and myriad spies in ports, airports, police stations and government offices. Their intelligence systems flushed out turncoats and traitors, and they ruthlessly exterminated their enemies. Yet Chandler, an HM Customs investigator fluent in Spanish, knew he could succeed only by recruiting local informants and went out into the field to find them. Within four years he had a network of 50 agents buried deep inside the trafficking organisations. The result was unprecedented. Their intel led to the arrest of hundreds of narcos and to the seizure of 300 tonnes of drugs, worth a staggering $3 billion.

Chandler's web disrupted the Bogotá mafia, who controlled the main airport and boasted they could put anything on a plane, from drugs to bombs; penetrated the go-fast crews who raced coke-laden speedboats to the transit station of Jamaica; dismantled the 'rip-on' teams who smuggled through the coastal ports; and identified the so-called motherships, the largest method of bulk transit ever discovered.

He faced appalling risks. Treacherous stool pigeons worked for both sides, and some of his Colombian law-enforcement colleagues were abducted, tortured and killed. Chandler too faced a grave threat when the crime lords learned he was responsible for a string of interdictions. Yet he persisted, driven to continue with the greatest series of sustained seizures ever made, until he finally burned out and his tour of duty came to an end. Two of his best sources were subsequently murdered, and his bosses dropped the entire overseas informant programme, with dire consequences.

Narco Wars is an unflinching story of danger, fear and stress and of the tradecraft and unsung heroism of the agents and their handlers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Milo Books
• Release date: Feb 9, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005068455

Book preview

PROLOGUE

A CUBAN CRISIS

AT 10 P.M. ON Saturday, 28 September 1996, a small freighter flying a Honduran flag cast off from its mooring in Barranquilla, on the north coast of Colombia, and quietly set sail. The night air was hot and sticky after an afternoon of heavy rain. Black storm clouds still glowered overhead, blocking out any light from the moon, and the dark blue hull of the seventy-metre vessel was barely visible as it eased down the Magdalena river and northwards into the Caribbean Sea. The thumping bass and salsa music booming from Barranquilla’s bars slowly faded away. The sea was calm, and having checked his marine forecasts the Colombian captain was relieved to know that good weather and easy sailing lay ahead. He was carrying a cargo of waste paper to offload in Havana, on the north coast of Cuba. He also had on board another cargo, one that he and his crew would secretly hand over to speedboats at a prearranged rendezvous at sea, under the cover of night, before his arrival in port: cocaine.

Fair weather and a calm sea would make the job much safer. In high winds and choppy waves, the task of transferring drugs to small boats was hazardous for the crews and highly dangerous for the captain himself. If any was lost into the sea, he would be held responsible. One missing bale would cost him his entire payment for the trip, or even his life if the cartel didn’t accept his explanation. Until the drugs were handed over, any problems were his sole responsibility.

The captain mulled over the possibilities as he sailed slowly northward. He prayed that with fine conditions and good luck, the contraband would soon be delivered without any glitches, sent on its way to the Florida Keys and from there to the table tops and noses of wealthy Americans.

It was not until late the following morning that Pacho telephoned to give me the update.

‘Señor,’ he panted, out of breath and excited. ‘The Limerick has gone. It left last night and is on its way. We need to act quickly.’

I was at home in Bogotá, enjoying a quiet Sunday morning with my family. I stopped what I was doing, reached for my notebook and pen, and told Pacho to take his time and calmly give me as much detail as he could.

‘This is the run, señor. For certain. They loaded the drugs last night and then it left at about ten o’clock. I think it’s about three tonnes, and it’s hidden in two secret compartments in the water tanks, or beneath them.’

Pacho was one of my network, and he was good. He had been working for me as an informant for ten months and had managed to sniff out top-quality information about large cocaine shipments by sea. He knew he could call me anytime, night or day, to pass it on. He had first heard about the cargo ship called Limerick several months earlier when it was moored at Palermo, a small jetty on the Magdalena river on the outskirts of Barranquilla. Palermo was away from the main port and had no loading facilities, and there was no reason at all for a legitimate cargo vessel to anchor there. He had heard rumours that it was killing time, waiting for traffickers to bring a large quantity of drugs before moving to a commercial jetty to take on legitimate cargo. Pacho had been patiently gathering intelligence about the ship since then and had even managed to infiltrate deep into the transport organisation.

I managed to calm Pacho down a little and get him to tell me the story in more detail. He said the Limerick had sailed from Barranquilla and was heading to Cuba with a cargo of waste-paper. He couldn’t say the exact quantity of drugs on board, but he knew for certain that it was huge, perhaps more than three tonnes, maybe even five. He gave me a description of the two places where it was concealed deep within the ship: a secret compartment beneath the fresh water tanks at the front, and another somewhere beneath the main cargo hold. The crew knew how to open hidden hatches and get to the coke, and he warned me that it would be difficult to find without their help. The drugs were to be handed over to speedboats known as ‘go-fasts’ the night before the Limerick reached Cuba.

The Limerick had a head start of about thirteen hours, so I needed to act. Every minute that passed would make it harder to find a small ship in the vast expanse of the Caribbean. And just because it had declared that it was sailing to Havana didn’t mean it would go straight there. Often the captains of drug ships told port authorities that they were going in a certain direction to a specified port, then took a different route or went somewhere else to thwart surveillance.

I thanked Pacho and punched in the telephone number of Martin, my customs colleague and the British drug liaison officer, or DLO, based in Miami, Florida. Martin and I had worked together on a few cases before. He was a smart, energetic young DLO and got things done. After just eighteen months in Miami he had built up an excellent reputation with the key US agencies.

‘Martin, I’ve got an urgent one. It left last night and is heading up to you. It’s a dead cert from a really good source, and it’s big. I need you to pull out all the stops on this one.’

I gave him all the details I had over the telephone. In later years this would be strictly forbidden and we would only ever discuss cases via encrypted Sectéra phones, but in those days we had to speak on open lines and just ‘rocker it up’, disguising our meaning with jargon as best we could. Had it been less urgent I could have waited until Monday and used the secure comms at the British embassy in Bogotá, but I couldn’t risk waiting and losing the ship.

Within minutes, Martin was on the phone to coordinate action with JIATF, the Joint Interagency Task Force (South). It was a Sunday, but people worked 24/7 at JIATF, the maritime coordination centre based in Key West, Florida, where the US Coast Guard, Customs, Drug Enforcement Administration, Federal Bureau of Investigation and other agencies worked together to combat international drug trafficking. Martin had established a close working relationship with JIATF and they held in highest regard the intelligence that he gave them from Her Majesty’s Customs and its network of DLOs. They had learned to trust the quality of our intel and were willing to act upon it and task expensive resources without question. Within a few hours, a US maritime surveillance plane was taking off from a military airbase in Panama to start a methodical search pattern over the Caribbean Sea north of Barranquilla, scanning the ocean below for the Limerick.

Heavy cloud cover made it even harder to find than usual, and it was not until the following day, after several sorties, that a surveillance aircraft spotted the ship and reported back its location, speed and course. In the Joint Operations Command Centre at JIATF, a large electronic map on the wall showed the location of all active US and allied maritime assets in the Caribbean region. The Royal Navy frigate on current duty, known as the West Indies Guard Ship, was shown on the map as patrolling in the Eastern Caribbean, as were vessels of the French and Dutch navies, along with several US Coast Guard and Customs patrol ships. The nearest available law enforcement asset in the region was a US Coast Guard ship in the Gulf of Mexico, but it would take a day or two to reach the target ship. The JIATF Operations Commander ordered it to immediately change course and head as quickly as possible to intercept the Limerick.

The events that subsequently unfolded can only be described as chaotic, but would ultimately make international headlines and have a significant impact on US–Cuban relations. The Coast Guard ship was guided by continuous reports on the location, speed and course of the Limerick from the surveillance aircraft high above. It headed south-east at full speed, deviating from its course at the last minute so that it came upon the Limerick from the rear, to avoid being detected too early. On 1 October the target was intercepted south of Cuba, as it headed northwards just outside territorial waters. The Colombian captain of the Limerick, Francisco Williams-May, knew that US military ships could not enter Cuban waters, so when he saw his grey-hulled pursuer approaching he made a dash to safety. But the faster cutter outran him, and he was intercepted. An armed Coast Guard search team jumped into a rigid inflatable pursuit craft, sped across the water between the two ships and boarded the Limerick, where they detained the captain and his twelve crew and took control of the helm.

So far it had been a textbook operation, but when they carried out an initial search they could not find any narcotics. The Colombian crew did not put up physical resistance, but were unhelpful. The Coast Guard, having been briefed by JIATF that the cocaine might be in deep, secret compartments, decided to escort the Limerick to the nearest US Customs base in Florida, where it could be thoroughly searched. However, they made the big mistake of allowing the Limerick’s crew to remain on board without close supervision. As both vessels set off northwards, the Limerick began to slowly settle lower into the water and then tilt dangerously to one side. The boarding team checked below and discovered that the crew had tried to scuttle the ship by opening the bilge valves, so that seawater was now flooding into the holds. They had decided that it was better to send their ship to the bottom than have its hidden cargo discovered and face many years in an American jail.

Fearing that the ship was going down, the Coast Guard officers and all the crew were quickly evacuated and brought to safety on board the patrol ship. They all then watched as the semi-submerged Limerick, with water lapping over its decks, drifted slowly into Cuban waters. The Colombian crew were praying that it would sink, the Coast Guard were hoping that it would float. To the dismay of both, the Limerick drifted onto a submerged sandbank and ran aground – a few hundred metres inside Cuban waters.

JIATF now had a problem. They had the crew, but the cocaine – the evidence – was just out of reach. The US authorities immediately made a formal request to Havana for permission to enter their waters and recover the vessel. They hoped to re-seal the valves, pump out the seawater and tow it back to the USA. At that time, however, there were no diplomatic relations between the two countries. The US had an embargo against Cuba, American companies could not trade there, there were no mutual financial dealings and even direct flights were not allowed. A few years earlier, the US had accused Fidel Castro’s brother, Raul, of being involved in drug trafficking. Whilst possibly true, it was a public insult to the Castro family and added fuel to the political hostility between the two countries. Given this tense situation, it was no surprise that Cuba emphatically refused permission and instead sent one of its own warships to claim the prize. Cuban navy experts re-floated the Limerick and towed it back to Santiago de Cuba. They cheekily even kept the search tools that had been left on board by the US Coast Guard during their hasty evacuation.

Now it was our turn to step in again. Alan was the British DLO in Jamaica and worked out of the high commission in Kingston. He was also responsible for our law enforcement liaison with Cuba, which did not have its own DLO. Alan was briefed on events, and took the next flight to Havana to help coordinate with the Cuban authorities. By pure coincidence, Tom Sackville, a junior minister at the Home Office, was also visiting there at the same time. On the evening of 2 October, an official dinner was held at the British ambassador’s residence in Havana, in honour of the minister’s visit. Attendees included the Minister of Interior, the heads of the police and customs, and other senior dignitaries from both countries. President Fidel Castro himself had been invited but was not expected to attend. At the last moment, however, he turned up. Taking advantage of the situation, he gave an after-dinner speech in which he announced that the United States had searched a suspected mothership outside Cuban waters but had failed to find any drugs. Cuba was now towing the vessel to port, where they would search it. He wanted the world to see that Cuba was doing its bit in the fight against trafficking. Fidel then invited Alan to be present during the search.

The following morning, Alan was taken on board Fidel Castro’s private presidential jet and flown from Havana to Santiago de Cuba to oversee the search of the Limerick. He had to walk something of a tightrope. He had to gain the trust of the Cubans, who tended to view all Western officials as potential spies, but could not tell them that the UK had an informant, nor even that the original intelligence had come from Colombia, because if there was ever a leak this might put Pacho and myself at risk. Throughout his stay on the island, I made sure I only communicated with Alan on secure lines via Martin in Miami, or via London, so that the Cubans would not detect that he was receiving calls and information directly from Colombia.

The Cuban Border Guard searched the ship for several days. They had pumped out water from the flooded areas, looked in every part of the ship, and worked to the point of exhaustion, but could not find any drugs. Alan sent me a message that he desperately needed more details of where the drugs were hidden, because the Cubans were ready to give up the search.

Meanwhile, the crew of the Limerick had been taken to the Bahamas, where they were being held by the US Coast Guard, but the American authorities said that by midnight on 5 October the captain and crew would either have to be charged or released. Unless the Cubans could find the drugs by Saturday, the crew would be set free. I asked Pacho to try to get some more specific details about where the drugs were hidden. He said he’d try but wasn’t hopeful. He knew that the narcos would be on edge and wary of anyone asking questions. It would be extremely dangerous to push his luck.

‘Señor, I think we got lucky,’ he said when he called a day later. ‘The traffickers are annoyed that the Limerick has been stopped, but they are confident that the Cubans won’t find the drugs. They say it is hidden so deep that it can’t be found. I heard that one part is in a secret compartment beneath the water tank at the front of the ship. The only way to find it would be for someone to go underwater into the inside of the water tank to release a secret hatch, and they say that no one will ever think of looking there.’

This was the speck of gold dust that I needed. I passed it to London, and they relayed it immediately via secure channels to Alan. He then encouraged the Cubans to look for concealments inside or beneath the front water tank.

In the early evening of 5 October, the search team found a freshly welded steel plate in a water tank at the front of the ship, in an area that had previously been flooded. They cut open the plate and saw behind it a compartment with bales inside. With just a couple of hours to go before the deadline, they pulled out 1.8 tonnes of white powder. It was the biggest cocaine seizure the Cuban Border Guard had ever made. Reinvigorated by success, they continued searching for several more days, but did not find any more drugs, and eventually gave up. As far as they were concerned, it was a huge seizure and the case was now over. They were ecstatic.

Back in my office in Bogotá, however, I was dismayed. Pacho was certain that there was another stash deep inside the ship, packed with several more tonnes. I urged him to push for more details of its exact location, but we both knew that he couldn’t ask more questions without putting himself in great danger. Pacho, however, was nothing if not resourceful, and a few days later he was able to confirm that the second load was hidden either deep beneath the cargo hold or under the rear water tanks. Reassured, I urged Alan to get the Cubans to carry on searching, and pushed for them to let either us or the Americans send a specialist search team out. HMCE had experienced searchers who knew every nook and cranny of a ship and I was convinced that they would find the rest of the drugs, if only London would agree to pay their airfares and if the Cubans would swallow their pride and accept outside help. It might even be necessary to do a ‘destructive’ search to find this kind of concealment, cutting open sections of the ship with specialist equipment.

To everyone’s surprise, after several weeks of calculated pressure from Alan the Cuban authorities swallowed their pride and agreed to allow a small US Customs team to search the ship. They duly arrived, and after two days of meticulous searching they found the second compartment deep inside the bowels of the vessel. As we suspected, it was much larger, and contained a further 4.8 tonnes. It had taken almost a month from the vessel’s interception, but a total of 6.6 tonnes of pure cocaine had been recovered. It was by far the biggest seizure of cocaine ever made in Cuba, and to this day one of the biggest made in the entire Caribbean region.

The US Coast Guard still had a dilemma. They had taken the captain and twelve crew to Miami and wanted to prosecute them, but Cuba had the ship, the drugs and all the necessary evidence. In another significant change of policy, the Cubans agreed to cooperate with the Americans in prosecuting those responsible and, for the first time, shared evidence with them. They allowed the cocaine to be sent to Miami, and their own Border Guard officers flew there several months later to testify at the trial. The captain and crew were all convicted, and the extraordinary case of the Limerick became historically significant for sparking a general thawing of US–Cuban relations.

In a final twist, a short time later our man in Jamaica, Alan, was summoned back to Cuba for a meeting with Fidel Castro. He was taken to his private residence, where the President extended his personal thanks to Alan and to HM Customs for their outstanding cooperation and support to Cuba in its fight against drug trafficking. He then gave Alan a medal, along with a signed photograph of their first meeting at the ambassador’s residence. Castro understood that intelligence from HMCE in London had led to the seizure, but no mention was ever made of myself, Pacho or Colombia. Alan happily took all the credit and enjoyed the attention. That suited me just fine. The safety of Pacho and myself lay in no-one ever knowing what had caused the seizure.

Back in Colombia, Pacho and I kept our heads down, and he set about infiltrating deeper into the organisation. Two more ‘motherships’ were already being prepared, and Pacho had heard that they were going to take massive consignments of cocaine across the Atlantic. They would put tonnes of cocaine onto the streets of the UK and Europe. We had to stop them.

1

THE ROAD TO BOGOTÁ

SEAHAM WAS ONCE a tiny village on the north-east coast of County Durham, where a few dozen families lived in a cluster of humble dwellings by the sea. Its small parish church, St Mary the Virgin, remains one of the oldest surviving Saxon churches in Britain. When I grew up there in the 1960s and 70s it had grown to be a busy mining town, with three pits and a small harbour to load the coal boats. It was a hard-working and tight-knit community where back doors were left open and everybody knew each other’s business. My mother was born there, lived there for all of her eighty-four years, and died there. She knew everyone in Seaham, and when given a name could tell you who they were, who their parents were, what they did, who they married, and even who their sweethearts had been when they were young.

My father was a staunch Roman Catholic, and because of this I was offered a place at St Aidan’s grammar school, run by the Irish Christian Brothers, in the city of Sunderland, six miles away. The Brothers were hard men, renowned for their strict discipline. Thanks to the constant threat of the leather strap, with which I became only too familiar, I acquired both a strong work ethic and the respectable cluster of ‘O’ and ‘A’ levels that got me into university. But when I set off to study Spanish, I never imagined for one second that it would become such an important cornerstone of my life, nor that it would lead me to spend fifteen years working in South America and other foreign countries against the infamous Colombian drug cartels.

I joined the ranks of HMCE thanks to my future father-in-law, John, who was a senior customs officer in Hull docks. He managed a small team of rummagers whose job was to search ships for smuggled contraband. While I was still a student he invited me to accompany him a couple of times on Sundays, and I watched as he went on board ships recently arrived from abroad. He would speak with the captain, usually over a cup of tea or a glass of something stronger, and ask about where they had come from, their cargo and their crew. Depending on the answers, his scrutiny of the cargo manifest and his gut feeling as a seasoned officer, he would then decide whether to have the ship searched. What a fantastic job, I thought. I had no idea what I wanted to do when I finished college, only that I had no desire to work in an office; the thought of interviewing foreign crewmen and searching ships for contraband was much more appealing.

So when I finished my course I applied to join HMCE. I had a degree in Spanish and Italian and spoke a little French, to complement my native Geordie-English. During the interview I explained with some passion that I wanted to work in a busy port or airport where I could put my languages to good use. I thought I had convinced them and felt sure that this is where they would send me. I was pleased and excited a few months later when I received a letter offering me a job, but outraged when I read that my first post would be in Birmingham VAT Office – as a value-added tax inspector. What were they thinking? I never knew whether it was the result of a mistake, or incompetence in the Civil Service appointments section, or whether someone had done it out of pure mischief, with a smirk on his face.

Whatever the reason, I became a VAT inspector for the next four years. I would visit different firms every day of the week, discuss how their businesses worked, check their records and look for anomalies and underpayments of tax. Contrary to my initial expectations, I came to love the work. One day I might be visiting a builder or publican, the next day a jewellery manufacturer or large engineering company. I liked talking to the traders, finding out what they did and probing how they worked. By chatting to them informally I often gleaned far more than they would have wanted, and uncovered more tax underpayments by simply talking to people than I did by looking at their accounts. With hindsight, it was a fantastic way of developing my interview and interpersonal skills. I learned to deal with people from all walks of life, from manual workers to lawyers to managing directors.

I fell into the investigation side of customs work by a stroke of pure luck, a random incident that would change the course of my life. I had recently been transferred from Birmingham to London, and was making a VAT visit to a large wholesaler of sports equipment in the Notting Hill area. I was in a downstairs office when I suddenly heard the elderly director cry out for help. I went into the hallway and heard loud bangs and sounds of distress coming from upstairs. I began to run up the stairs to investigate, and had got halfway when a fearsome Mike Tyson lookalike suddenly appeared and came charging down towards me, followed by an equally frightening accomplice. From behind them came a stream of shouts.

‘Help!’

‘Stop them!’

‘We’ve been robbed!’

What happened next was not a question of me being courageous, far from it, I just couldn’t get out of their way. The two intruders were in their early twenties, built like athletes, and came rushing down the narrow stairway towards me. I was a small, nine-stone obstacle blocking their escape. The first one smashed into me and we both crashed down the stairs, head over heels, in a jumble of flailing arms and legs. Fortunately when we hit the bottom I landed on top of him, and somehow was able to pin him down, with his face into the floor and his right arm